Having Fun with CSS

A while back I mentioned how I was working on the website for my parents’ church. My goal for the rest of the year was to improve the WordPress child theme that I had built for them, and maybe rebuild it as an independent theme from scratch.

Confession: I never reached that goal.

I still want to build a WordPress theme someday, but I had a reality check after writing that post:

My parents wanted to get away from having to repeatedly install updates for WordPress and their plugins.

Nothing about the functionality of their site was so unique or complex that it required a self-hosted WordPress installation.

My CSS skills far surpass my PHP skills (although I still have plenty to learn in both areas).

I’ve learned a lot this year about how much one can do with a site hosted at WordPress.com.

So I decided that instead of building a child theme, I’d help them move their site to WordPress.com and customize it a bit. No more having to deal with installing updates or worrying about breaking anything. And I was sure to get it done faster!

The church still had some very specific design wishes for the site, so they weren’t going to settle for an out-of-the-box theme. And they really wanted it to be mobile-friendly. So I decided to start them out with the Responsive theme and go from there.

They knew they wanted to customize the theme, remove ads, and use their church’s domain name with the site. They decided to spend just a little more and get all of the upgrades in the WordPress.com Premium plan. I went to town with the custom design features, they gave me their input, and we ended up here:

I still see things here and there that I want to tweak, and I want to clean up the CSS a bit, but overall I’m really happy with how it turned out. If you’re curious to see more, head on over to the North Liberty First United Methodist Church website and take a look!